Winner Takes It All

Ok, maybe not all but a lot more than we were hoping for.  Yesterday was the inaugural GWR Fleece Show and we couldn't attend because we are still waiting for Cherrybomb to produce her first cria and she seems to be in no hurry.  We had entered fleeces but didn't get our hopes up as we knew that they were going to be up against some top quality animals and the judge was to be Dominic Lane who must have seen some of the best fleeces produced in the world.  In the middle of the afternoon my phone rang and it was Rosemary from Westhill Alpacas who was helping to run the show and she just had a quick few seconds to tell me that we had got a 1st and a place but she didn't know which classes and had to get off the phone to get back to collecting fleeces for Dominic to judge.  We were over the moon as that was much more than we were expecting.

We had even better news in the evening when Rosemary phoned again once she got home.  We had actually got a 1st, a 2nd plus two 5ths and a highly commended.  The highly commended was for Cherrybomb's fleece and what completely amazed me was that she said that Dominic had mentioned Cherrybomb had had a nutrition problem at some time in the year.  He was absolutely right.  During the really bad weather this winter I had noticed that she wasn't feeding at the troughs with the other girls and it took some coaxing to get her to feed.  She now insists on being fed by hand.  We are particularly pleased because we have got prizes for animals that we have bred ourselves so it proves that we are heading in the right direction.

You can now see picture of our multi prize winning herd.  It feels so good to type that.

 Penny will rest her head anywhere, here it is resting on Carrie's back

 Five of this year's cria with a couple of their prizewinning mothers

Penny again, she's not old enough to eat hay yet so has taken to wearing it instead and Exhibition is quite happy to eat it off her.